<p> This qualitative study analyzed the meaning-making practices of urban adolescents participating in a college preparatory program featuring philosophical inquiry into cosmopolitanism and the creation of multimodal texts. In contrast to studies of composing that focus on individual outcomes, this dissertation traced group meaning making. The study was grounded in sociocultural perspectives that theorize literacy as diverse, socially constructed, meaning-making practices that emerge in particular cultural and social contexts, and include multiple modes of communication. Data included interviews, observations, and artifacts. To analyze the data, a music-inspired analytic system was devised to examine the collaborative nature of composing. </p><p> The study demonstrated, first, that composing in this setting was a collaborative process exceeding customary understandings of collaborative composing. Uncovered after examining complex patterns of interactions over varied timescales, collaboration at the group level occurred while community members created individual products. Second, the study revealed that improvisation was an important strategy for shaping the content of this collaborative process. During informal jam sessions, participants creatively explored options for representing content. They actively built upon ideas offered by other participants in the moment, in order to read, interpret, select, and design the content of their multimodal texts. Last, facilitated by the complex patterns of interaction and shaped by the improvised frames for representing content, this study revealed the ways in which participants constructed a shared meaning of the concept of cosmopolitanism at the group level. Utilizing an image-afforded exploration of juxtaposition, this shared understanding evolved from early conceptions of cosmopolitanism as represented in juxtaposed images to an understanding of cosmopolitanism as the act of creating and interpreting juxtaposition between varying perspectives. </p><p> This study contributes to growing empirical research on meaning making through multimodal text design. It extends socio-cultural explanations of what counts as `social' in educational contexts, illustrating that composing is not just influenced by social interaction but rather <i>is</i> social. Finally, in an age of standards, testing, and accountability that can narrow what constitutes valued literacy practices, this study provides an example of the varied interactional paths and diverse compositional strategies and products that can engage learners and expand opportunities for meaning making.</p>

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Wollongong, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Washington, 1996. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves [198]-211).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Illinois State University, 2005. / Title from title page screen, viewed September 27, 2006. Dissertation Committee: Karen S. Coats (chair), C. Anita Tarr, Nancy D. Tolson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 142-149) and abstract. Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-11, Section: A, page: 4149. Adviser: Karen A. Ferneding. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 226-231) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Thesis (M.A.)--Montana State University--Bozeman, 2007. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: Michael Sexson. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-81).

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Indiana University, Dept. of Language Education, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-04, Section: A, page: 1257. Advisers: Larry Mikulecky; Curtis J. Bonk. "Title from dissertation home page (viewed June 19, 2007)."

This thesis investigates the rise of aviation and its influence on modernist literature in the first half of the twentieth century, arguing that the emergence of heavier-than-air flight facilitated experimentation and innovation in modernist writing in order to capture the new experience of flight and its impact on the modern world. Previous critical discussions largely focus on militarist and nationalist ideas and beliefs regarding the uses of the aeroplane, and in doing so overlook the diversity of attitudes and approaches towards aviation that had greater influence on modernist thought. Through a historicist reading of a selection of modernist texts, this study extends scholarly debates by linking alternative views of aviation and modernist literary and narrative experimentation. I begin my study by exploring how H.G. Wells's calls for the establishment of a world government (necessitated by the emergence of aviation) led to an increasingly assertive and urgent tone in his later writings. His works serve as a useful starting point to read the more experimental, modernist prose forms that follow in his wake. While Wells's texts were affected on a pragmatic level, those of the modernists were affected in a more imaginative, perceptual, and sensory way, which highlights the deeper extent to which aviation influenced modernist thought. For Virginia Woolf, the all-encompassing aerial view offered a new way of seeing the connections between living things, leading to an expanded narrative scope in her later writings. For William Faulkner, flight as aerial performance and spectacle was a liberating experience and became a metaphor for escape from an increasingly capitalistic and creativity-deprived world. John Dos Passos, in contrast, saw the effects of air travel as harmful to the human senses and perceptions of the world around, leading him to incorporate aspects of flight into his fast-paced, multi-modal narratives in order to convey and critique the disorienting and alienating experience of flight. Collectively, these chapters show that as much as the aeroplane was capable of causing mass destruction, it was also constructive in the way that it enabled these new ways of thinking, and it is this complex and paradoxical nature, this thesis proposes, that makes the aeroplane an important modernist symbol.

This thesis emerges out of a study of Thomas Pynchon’s work, from certain qualities and attributes that recur in his writing, notably the forces and hauntings of technology; the project is, further, alert to these phenomena as it is to Pynchon’s prose technique which exemplifies these aspects in its proliferative connections and modes of association. The study, whose title similarly derives from Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, offers readings of literary, historical and visual texts, and examines the radioactive substance, as well as the cultural implications and material manifestations, of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and of its support mechanisms. Adopting an interdisciplinary perspective, the thesis focuses on the interface between geography and technology, and identifies how missile technology is expressed, developed and linked to already existing narratives of particular US states. It uses methods and interpretations drawn from the creative mythologies of Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson, the fields of cultural and military studies, theories of technology formulated by Paul Virilio, Jean Baudrillard, Laurence Rickels and Paul N. Edwards, architectural and spatial theories developed by Henri Lefebvre and Anthony Vidler, and Cold War horror and science fiction movies, all of which frame the wider issues involved. The premise for the project is the representation of American power, or of the ‘American spirit’, in D.H Lawrence’s words, as a monster, a vampire which feeds on the subjects of the nation; this notion of vampirism is latent in the project’s four chapters, on Colorado, Kansas, Cape Canaveral and New York, which seek to address different aspects of the country’s flights into (nuclear) enclosures. The first chapter, ‘Excavation’, focuses on the state of Colorado and uranium mining, and examines the missile’s substance, its nuclear core, through close readings of Stephen King’s The Shining. The second chapter, ‘Preservation’, is concerned with the state of Kansas and the missile silo, and employs the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Allen Ginsberg, Thomas Pynchon, Frank Baum and a range of political and military studies to arrive at a consideration of the form of the missile silo as the epitome of an architecture of storage. The third chapter, ‘Evacuation’, homes in on Cape Canaveral, guided by J.G. Ballard’s Space Age short stories and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, and utilises archival material from James E. Webb, NASA administrator from 1961–1967, to argue that narratives of progress and possibilities of movement are bound to the need to seek refuge in static enclosures. The fourth chapter, ‘Transmission’, zeroes in on New York, and is concerned with missile defence; it deploys analysis of the works of H.G Wells, Jonathan Schell, Nikola Tesla, Ronald Reagan and Elaine Scarry to discuss the transmission of rays, and of rumours.

<p> In today&rsquo;s K-12 educational environment with the newly adopted Common Core State Standards (CCSS), improving student literacy as a foundational skill to obtain success in all other subject areas is one of the most important goals. Unfortunately, many literature curricula suffer from a lack of innovative pedagogy despite the introduction of various educational technologies meant to aid student learning. This study focused on developing a new game-based constructionist pedagogical model for literature education using tabletop role-playing game creation. Using Shulman&rsquo;s (1987) Pedagogical Content Knowledge (PCK) that eventually evolved into Mishra and Kohler&rsquo;s (2006) Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) as the main theoretical framework, this design-based research showed how tabletop role-playing game creation as a constructionist pedagogical strategy successfully helped high school students to receive the benefits of high quality literature education. </p>